


Bleak As Milk

by Petronelle



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-07 05:11:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14663988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petronelle/pseuds/Petronelle
Summary: Writing exercise, short angst oneshot exploring feelings w/o dialogue.





	Bleak As Milk

She was sprawled, pedestaled as Venus, upon the bed, with the winding sheets tangled around her limbs like wild gorse. The world was quiet here. The beast was beautifully still, a smile stapled into her cheeks in sleep as a relic of the evening past. The corners of her lips were still sharp, hooked edges of a crescented moon in her peerless, satin face. She was smooth as eggshells and the colour of snow, but for those lips, insistently kissed to a shade of bruising raspberry and parted slightly as though midmurmur in quiet conversation with the divine lapis of the sky.  
Olivia had nothing to say. She sat alone, at the little table, nursing a cup of tea that seemed to stare blankly upward with milky dispassion, gloomily pale. Olivia picked absently at the tablecloth, the sky outside tried to clamber into her bed, the wind breathed at the door and prayed for somewhere to rest for the night; Esmé slept. She was a skyful of thunder tipped into the shape of a woman, and kissed to sleep. She was fire that danced menacingly across carnival silks and swallowed libraries, and their librarians, whole. Esmé was the winter of Olivia Caliban's existence, and the only fluency between them was l'appel du vide; real words were hailstones that bounced off and cut Olivia's thoughts, huddled like chicks in the back of her mind, to ribbons. They fell into each other with the starving desperation only the truly lost can muster. An impotent husband had sloughed off, and Esmé had emerged glassy as costume jewellery, keen for admiration. Olaf wore her as a cheap token. Olivia watched the way she caught the light.  
Neither of them had ever intended to feel anything, and yet here they were; Olivia drowning in evening, and Esmé asleep as though dead, her heart full of all of the love she had drunk so greedily from Olivia's lips, as bloody and heavy as communion.  
When they had whispered "I love you", Esmé had bound herself in the velvet flux of sleep like armour, and Olivia sat in the dark and cradled the echo.  
She returned to bed, tea abandoned, its ersatz face lost uselessly in pale thought. All amongst the sheets, amongst Esmé, the barbed coil of tears wound around her ribs; amongst the embrace of Her, as gold as haloed Mary, Olivia wept. Esmé was bound to an ignorant slumber, comfortable to smile even in the bleakest dark, her eyes blinded behind the pall of forgettable dreams.


End file.
